Book details of 'The Jericho Iteration'

Title	The Jericho Iteration
Author(s)	Allen Steele
ISBN	0441002714
Language	English
Published	November 1995
Publisher	Ace Books

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Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
It's rather amazing how little science there is in science fiction, sometimes. Even in stories of the "near future," such as this one, technology takes a very distant backseat to politics and plotting. Which is probably as it should be, but it does make you wonder why it's called science fiction. Well, let's get rid of the plot first. Lone individual against the mighty forces, conspiracy of the elite plotting to overthrow the last bastion of democracy, and a rogue program takes over the defence forces and uses force against the defenders. However, the rogue isn't the bad guy. Steele does give us some technology. I purely love his personal/palmtop/vest pocket computer/personal digital assistant. Given the advances in time and technology, it seems just a little bit shy on memory and storage space, but we'll let that ride. Having both keyboard and voice command is undoubtedly the way to go, for reasons very similar to those in the book. Of course, the author does not seem to realize that you can track any cell phone, as long as it is on, to a very close area. Also, nobody seems to have done much work on encryption over the next few years. Lastly, I don't think much of the disk format. I suspect about 7 cm is about as small as you can get before people start losing the disks, which would be an annoyance. Human factors, doncha know. (And CD-ROMs are already optical disks.) I'm glad to see that email is tagged as the way to get the word out fast and far. However, the expert geeks involved in the story don't seem to have fully cottoned on to the fact that you can send partial info if you're short of time, and you can set up systems to send automatically. The tension in the climactic scene as our intrepid heroes are facing the end is somewhat reduced when the reader keeps on thinking "just use chron, OK?" But, of course, my real interest is in the iteration of the title. A repeating, self-reproducing program. In other words, a virus. Well, they have to be other words, if you want to be pedantic about it. The virus in the book is p1 all over again , a fairly classic Shoch and Hupp type segmented worm program. And, like p1, the bigger it gets, the smarter it gets, until it becomes self-aware. Now, there are a couple of points here. This is the classically mythical "just-wave-the-disk-near-the-computer-and-it-gets-infected" type virus. For those of us who have been battling the "Good Times" hoax for years, I can't be overjoyed about this idea. (Of course, just as we have started to get people to realize that you can't get infected just by reading email, Microsoft comes along and fixes that bug, so I really can't argue too strenuously against it. Never underestimate the stupidity, and cupidity, of large software vendors.) But it avoids detection, elimination, and access control by dealing with the "source code" of security programs. Repeat after me: once it's compiled, it's object code. Source code doesn't matter, and isn't kept with the executables. Of course, if it could find, and associate, the source code with the target executable, that would give you a leg up on disassembly. But a virus cannot be undetectable. And, in fact, this one isn't. Early on in the game a fairly simple file management program, with no particular special features, is able to detect the virus, and infected programs. So how come it is so hard to detect? Hard to eliminate I might grant you, but it certainly seems to be easy to find. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998
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Book description:

"I couldn't put it down" (John Varley) Through an earthquake-ravaged Midwest, an investigative reporter chases down the story of a lifetime. "Breathtaking...Steele's science [is] harder than Heinlein's...his breakneck pacing and gift for characterization are reminiscent of the late master's best work." (Washington Post